Blog Comments & Posts

I'm sorry but I think we are wrong. I just reread the announcement. It says "For advertisers that opted out, the option to disable close variants will be removed in September.". So we WILL be losing this option. In late September Google is taking away the ability for us to enable or disable variants.

See announcement: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/close-variant-matching-for-all-exact.html

This AdWords setting is exactly what I was thinking. I assume there are no plans to remove these settings though. So we can still do "exact match" without variants. Only difference is that we have an option to do it with or without variants. Right?

My firm manages quite a few sites that range in size. Around the 14th we saw a change in ranking for quite a few of them. It seems the sites with more content and more recently added content have received better rankings.

Thanks for the article. I look forward to a future article on a more indepth analysis of what may have changed.

SEO is not dead but SEO is something different now. It used to be that you did "SEO" and now it is more and more that you should think about SEO when you plan other marketing efforts and consider how an initiative can further factors that effect your search engine ranking.

For example, it is less of a question of things like "How can I get more links?" and more of "How we get the most value from the marketing campaign we are working on?" When SEO is part of a holistic approach it is more natural and easier -- And s a result more successful with a greater ROI.

What techniques have others used to break links? We have had the experiencing of taking over Internet marketing for a client to find they used to pay for links. Requesting to have links removed from "SPAM" blogs is a good first steps but often does not result in enough change. In the most recent example (which was three years ago), all of the inbound links went to inner pages so we changed the URLs of the pages. This broke the links and within a week the site went from being deep in relevant SERPs to first page results -- and increasing traffic by more than 300%.

I have not used disavow before. If we ever find a client in this situation again, that may be a good option. Especially since breaking links like we did last time by changing URLs is often not a good option. What other methods have others found successful?